In a city that works hard
-- and plays hard --
it's easy for normal socializing to turn destructive.Shutterstock

Jon, a documentary filmmaker in Greenwich Village, got so drunk on vodka a few years ago, he picked up the girlfriend of his friend’s boss outside a bar, spun her around and nearly cracked her head on the sidewalk when he dropped her.

“I was so embarrassed the next morning,” says Jon, now 41, who declined to give his last name for professional reasons. “I thought my friend was going to lose his job over it.”

Jon pledged to get sober but it didn’t stick. Six months later, he was making the rounds of New York’s ever-alluring forest of nightlife options, stopping by places like Employees Only or Daddy-O, occasionally popping in the bathroom for a bump of cocaine to keep the party going.

“In New York you can run around and mask that,” he says, noting it’s easy to barhop and socialize with different pals over the course of an evening.

Jon, who now also writes for the addiction website the Fix, finally got sober about four years ago, but not before he spent a long time lingering in the gray zone in which a lot of New Yorkers live. When does social drinking become problem drinking?

Insiders told The Post last week that they’re worried that Jimmy Fallon — the late-night host whose after-hours antics and injuries have made headlines in recent months — has crossed that line, fueled by job pressures and the intoxicating allure of celebrity.

He’s not the only one: Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia checked himself into rehab on Oct. 5 after a weekend-long bender. Jon Hamm, who played the hard-drinking ad executive Don Draper on “Mad Men,” spent 30 days in rehab for alcohol addiction earlier this year.

Part of the problem for New Yorkers is that the city lacks the same red flags that drinkers elsewhere face: No one drives and everyone takes pride in their ability to play hard.

The city lacks the same red flags that drinkers elsewhere face: No one drives and everyone takes pride in their ability to play hard.

“Uber is a great insulator for drinking,” says Brad Lamm, founder of Breathe Life Healing Centers, which operates rehab facilities nationwide.

“You’re not going to have one of those wake-up calls [such as a DWI].”

And in New York, where high-pressure jobs often require networking over cocktails — and happy hour offers an easy way to blow off steam — addiction can be harder to gauge.

“For a person in a city that’s socially lubricated by alcohol, the barometer is different for what alcoholism is,” says Nicholas Kardaras, Ph.D., executive director at the Dunes rehab facility in East Hampton, LI, where pampered high-fliers go to detox.

But he adds that there are subtle ways for New Yorkers to pinpoint if their social drinking has morphed into problem drinking — including “being dishonest with friends or loved ones about how much you drink.”

Another sign? If all your friends have gone home and you’re keeping the party going by yourself, the drinking is no longer “social.”

Perhaps, most surprising, is that taking steps to cut back your drinking — limiting yourself to weekends or sticking to wine after work — may actually indicate addiction.

“Those things are clear signs you have a problem, but you’re not looking at it as problematic,” says Richard Buckman, president of the Long Island Recovery Association.

If you want to keep up the bar lifestyle without worrying about alcoholism, experts recommend shaking up your routine: Opt for lunch meetings over happy-hour gatherings or order a soda instead of a rum and Coke so you still have something in your hand.

“Give yourself a challenge,” Lamm says. “Challenge yourself not to drink for 30 days to see if you can do it.”